Back to basics?

National | The failure of the XFL and the return of baseball's high strike may signal a recovery of civilization | Gene Edward Veith

Pop culture reduces everything—education, politics, even religion—to entertainment. Pleasure-crazed citizens-turned-spectators, conditioned by TV and consumerism, have to be subjected to ever-higher doses of stimulation; otherwise, they become paralyzed by boredom. For many Americans, sports—always before a source of excitement—have become boring. Like education, politics, and religion, they think sports needs a pop culture makeover.

Athletics is a classical enterprise. It was the ancient Greeks who turned the universal love of games into what we call sports. Just as classical education develops the mind for its own sake, pushing the mental gifts human beings have been given to their full potential, classical sports developed physical prowess for its own sake. Just as the pursuit of music included nothing particularly practical, so running around in circles at great speeds might seem pointless. But in Aristotle's terms, striving for any kind of perfection is a good in itself.